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Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.

William Monahan

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William Monahan
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: November 3
Critic
Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Claude La Badarian
Hundred
People
Move
Responsibility
Moving
Running
Keep
Odd
Enterprise
Two
Quickly
Really

More quotes by William Monahan

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Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.
William Monahan
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Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
William Monahan
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On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
William Monahan
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If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
William Monahan
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I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
William Monahan
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Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
William Monahan
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The empirical is very important, but merit is inherent and not acquired. A university is massively important because you can see where you stand naturally in the ranks, and try yourself out, but education is just reading and understanding what you read.
William Monahan
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You never know what people are going to go and see.
William Monahan
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Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.
William Monahan
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You can believe in originals only if you just don't know their context within literature. Certainly I believe in originality, but it lies with the teller, not the tale.
William Monahan
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I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
William Monahan
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All of a sudden I pulled up short and harked back to Ridley [Scott] holding up the script in Manhattan, at the St. Regis breakfast room, and saying, It's very visual, isn't it, and realized it was the key to my whole life since then.
William Monahan
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You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.
William Monahan
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I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it.
William Monahan
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If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.
William Monahan
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Doing crime films...maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps.
William Monahan
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Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
William Monahan
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In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.
William Monahan
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When I was very young, you would get the TV listings from The Globe and The Herald, and you would basically go through them, circle things, and map out your viewing week.
William Monahan
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It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
William Monahan